Tuesday, January 27, 2015

I was just sitting here thinking about my good friend, Playthell Benjamin. While I’m a firm believer in becoming one’s own hero, I really admire this guy, almost to the point of jealousy. I think he’s one of the great, and most under-recognized, writers and historians of our time (if you’re not familiar with him, look him up on Google). The reason I enjoy reading Playthell is because his writings always contain a wealth of information. That’s his brilliance. Regardless to what the subject, he’s a literal reservoir of information, and I’ve undoubtedly become a better writer as a result of reading him. Reading his writings have taught me to scrupulously avoid superficiality, and to look beneath the carpet of my subject matter to drive my points home.
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But we have a fundamental difference in the way we view the White academic establishment. He’s in awe of it (after all, it produced him), while I have a very critical view of contemporary academia, especially with respect to Black intellectual development. That’s one of two subjects that we never miss an opportunity to fight over. The other is the impact of sports on the Black community.
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Like most Black intellectuals, Playthell fully embraces the White academic establishment and considers being anointed by it what it means to be truly educated. I don’t. While I understand, and respect, what the White academic establishment has achieved in the physical sciences, I find it to be hugely flawed in what I consider the "Speculative Arts" - history, philosophy, politics, economics, and such. What it tends to produce is a bunch of establishment-serving clones. While the knowledge is definitely there - and every Black person alive should leave no stone unturned to avail themselves of it - it should be consumed with two boxes of salt, because it tends to be skewed toward promoting the prevailing interest of the establishment.
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Thus, we cannot trust the academic establishment to tell us who’s "brilliant," because the people who it anoints as brilliant are those who tend to embrace the establishment’s mindset. While these people often have opposing views on any group of facts, they all tend to base their thinking on the same philosophical assumptions. For example, the assumption that the White establishment’s water is wetter than everyone else’s.
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For that reason, I firmly believe that Black people should establish their own intellectual traditions, and we should put brutally critical thinking at the very root of that tradition. We should critically scrutinize EVERY fact that we’re exposed to before we accept it as a part of our data base, and any "fact" that doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny should be unceremoniously discarded, and that's regardless to whether it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside or not.
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For example, we shouldn’t accept the contention that Dr. Brainchild is a brilliant man simply because he taught at Harvard. We should ALWAYS listen to what Dr. Brainchild has to say, and make the determination on whether he’s brilliant or not for OURSELVES. And we should never assume that if he doesn’t seem to make sense, or if he speaks in convoluted sentences that cause us to forget the subject matter before he gets to a period, that we simply don’t understand him due to our lack of intellect or education. If we fail to do that, we’re allowing the establishment to tell us who to listen to, and that allows us to be played. We should never give anyone else's ability to think priority over our own. Both the GOP, and Fox News', very existence is based on people's willingness to allow others to think for them, and we're all paying a huge price for it. So if Dr. Brainchild is indeed as brilliant as the establishment claims he is, he should be able to communicate clearly, logically, and on a level that anyone can understand. If he can't, we should immediately write him off as just another academic lip flapper living on dubious credentials - and there are plenty of them out there.
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Black people, and Americans in general, need to understand that knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence are very different things from merely obtaining a degree. Malcolm didn’t even go to college; he got his education in jail, but who do you think was the more profound thinker, Malcolm X, or Cornel West?
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While I’m a great proponent of formal education, we must never forget that knowledge started with individual and independent thought, and only then, were educational institutions established to disseminate that thought. Thus, we don’t get knowledge, wisdom, and intellect from institutions - they get it from us. So we should never assume that because an individual has a "receipt" from Harvard that his thinking is any more profound than our own. After all, George W. Bush has a receipt from Yale.

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Eric L. Wattree

Strive To Become Your Own Hero... Then Let No One Remove Your Cape.

BIO

Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet, and musician, born in Los Angeles. He’s been a columnist for The Los Angeles Sentinel, Black Star News, The Atlanta Post, and is a member of the Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists (http://www.spj.org/). He’s also the author of "A Message From the Hood."Some of the greatest minds I’ve ever known held court while sitting on empty milk crates in the parking lots of ghetto liquor stores, while some of the weakest minds I’ve ever known roamed the halls of academia in pursuit of credentials over knowledge.Eric L. Wattreehttp://www.whohub.com/wattree

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